


Byrd is the Word

by QueSeraAwesome



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Typical Violence, Friendship, Gen, Male Friendship, Read it as shippy or platonic you do you friend, Season/Series 15 Spoilers, Spartan-affiliated fuckery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 09:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12528244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueSeraAwesome/pseuds/QueSeraAwesome
Summary: This story is brought to you by the letter "Big B!"





	Byrd is the Word

**Author's Note:**

> I loved my friend  
> He went away from me  
> There’s nothing more to say  
> The poem ends,  
> Soft as it began—  
> I loved my friend.
> 
> -Langston Hughes

Your first assignment after you are removed from your Spartan unit, you are deployed mid-engagement. You find half the squad huddling behind a rock formation, taking fitful shots at the Covenant forces down in the canyon. Some fifteen of them, separated by the Covenant from the rest of their outfit. Intel reports they have been likely locked in this position for an excess of six hours. One of them is nursing a fellow soldier with a steadily oozing leg wound and the dazed look of a concussion sufferer. Disorganized and dirty, nothing like the Spartans you used to serve with, the unit you have fought beside since you were twelve years old. At least you got to keep your armor. You straighten, and end up towering over them.

“Sit-rep,” you demand.

They hesitate. Unsure.  Darting glances at each other, until a voice somewhere beyond them cuts through the retort of gunfire.

“The hell’s going on back there?”

Step past them, closer to the hastily put together barricade and the active shooters.

The soldier catches your eye immediately. There is a different energy around him. True, he is no less weary, angry, or battered than any other soldier around him, but there is also something else. Something your sergeant would have called “sheer cussedness” with great approval. It rises off him like steam. He isn’t wearing a helmet. Remember the cracked shell of a helmet sitting at the concussed soldier’s feet, the whole one on his head. These helmets are of far inferior quality to your own. You can see not only their eyes through the faceplate, but the entirety of their facial expressions. They look exposed to you, like watching someone ride into battle on a Mongoose when accustomed to the protection of a tank. His face is strikingly bare. He is 6’1 with too many freckles, a too-young face and a shock of blonde hair that can’t be natural.

“Who the fuck’re you?” the soldier demands, turning to empty two shots into an approaching Jackal. It falls with a cut-off cry. Nice shot. Really nice shot.

“Sp—” Stop yourself. You aren’t a Spartan anymore. “Specialist. Command sent me. Gonna be attached to your unit until the Northern continent is cleared. Are you the ranking officer present?”

A few of the others snort. The soldier you were speaking to shoves the one next to him, and gets an elbow back in return. You hear something like “Fan Man” whispered in a joking tone, and he flips off someone over your shoulder.

You say nothing, let your silence echo your previous question. The woman on the soldier’s left shifts and speaks.

“David’s our Fan CO,” she explains. “Ain’t no one following his orders. That is, until the shit hits the fan.”

“The officers are pinned down with the other half of the squad,” ‘David’ continues, businesslike except for the eyeroll aimed at his fellows. “And I didn’t hear any of you complaining when I got our asses out of Reliance alive!”

“Just keep your cockroach powers working, man,” she replies. “Spread that shit around as much as you like.”

Good enough for you; zero in on him.

“What’s the situation.”

“They’re over there, we’re over here, and we don’t have enough firepower or manpower to get over there,” the soldier sums up. “We lost contact eight hours ago. No word or sign of them since, but there’s no back way and no Covenant have made it in, so they should still be alive. We’ve been keeping watch and suppressing fire in shifts. Not enough power to go forward, not enough supplies to get back to base.”

“What happened to supplies?”

“With the rest of the squad. This was just supposed to be a short recon trip, just a couple of days. We wouldn’t make it half way without the water and ammo that’s with the others,” His jaw sets. “And that’s even if you could convince us to leave them.”

Don’t argue with him, even though he’s clearly spoiling for it.

“Okay.”

Swing your rifle off your back. Let your HUD scan the canyon. Right.

“Now we have enough firepower,” You answer. “Ready your people.”

His eyebrows jump up to his hairline.

“Excuse me? We can’t all just charge in. I’ve got three injured, and another five on sleep shift. We weren’t long for making camp when the Covenant hit.”

“Let them stay. We’ll be enough,” you say. I’ll be enough. Mostly. “Get ready.”

His gaze shifts from you, and whatever the others see there, they ready themselves behind you. Strong unit cohesion. They must have been serving together a while.

“Frontal assault. On my mark.”

“Okay,” he says, stepping back to let you take point. He puts himself at your shoulder. “So, what’s your name, Specialist?”

Don’t answer him. Vault the barricade and take out two of the Elites within seconds of each other.

“Now!”

The squad charges forward and the bloodbath begins.

 

 

 

 

He has a scar on his upper lip and many on his knuckles. He is open and too honest, and gleefully vicious on the battlefield. His smile hides nothing, not weariness, not sadness, not the strength or ferocity of his anger or his happiness. The man who isn’t a Spartan anymore thinks, for the first time, he understands what it means when people are called beautiful.

 

 

 

 

Three die. All from the other half of the squad, though.

Sit in the mess back a base. Feel like an over-large alien among these soldiers. A different breed of animal. You are attached to this unit and you think that is absolutely correct. Attached. Not a part. The patches over your heart and on the shoulders of your fatigues read “M. Byrd.” That’s your name now.

(Technically, it always was. It just wasn’t what you’d been answering to for a long time now. If you were a different man you’d think that it’s a terrible thing, to steal a man’s name from him only to give it back when it isn’t his anymore. But you jumped out of a plane and became a Spartan at five years old. That’s the man you are. So you don’t think that, you just run your thumbs over the patches, tracing the letters before attaching them to your uniform.)

“You’re shitting me,” the young soldier from before says. Look up. David. He dumps his tray next to yours on the table. “Byrd? Really?”

Raise an eyebrow at him. Suck creamed corn off the bowl of your spoon. You didn’t know corn could be creamed. You aren’t sure it’s an improvement. You are still deciding.

“Problem?”

He shovels potatoes into his mouth. Looks you up and down in a considering way you aren’t used to. Sizing you up, but not evaluative. You can neither pass or fail this kind of assessment; he is only taking you in, familiarizing himself with your shape.

“It means,” he says, pointing his fork at you, “that you are, literally, Big Byrd.”

Blink at him. You have learned the sound of a punchline delivered, even if you don’t get the joke. You take a bite of carrots. Listen to him ramble next to you throughout the rest of the meal.

Later, you look it up. Your childhood had more rifle training than public services television.

Big Bird, though. That sticks.

 

 

 

 

He sticks, too.

 

 

 

 

Within a month, everyone is calling you “Big B.” Only the brave call you Big Bird. The brave are, almost without exception, cocky little shit-stirrers like the Fan Man. David. Your first friend outside the Spartan III program.

It is not professional, and you think you should probably be annoyed. You are expected to be annoyed. You grumble and growl on cue, enjoy the deference and fear they pantomime (Although some is sincere. Ford has probably never witnessed the way even juvenile pack hunters battle and fight among themselves during free time, and certainly never understood.).

But, truly? When you hear the Company Commander calling “Anyone know where the hell Specialist Big Byrd’s been all day?” it reminds you of two fingers, drawing a curved line over the faceplate of their helmet. It feels the same in your chest, deep down below your sternum.

 

 

 

 

“Okay, first of all, I’m still pissed at you,” is the first thing you hear him say upon blinking awake in medical. Your side is swathed in bandages. You have an IV, and more likely than not from the swimming sensation in your brain, painkillers. “You didn’t need to do that.”

Register the too-blond hair first. It takes a moment before his face swims into clarity, until you remember why you’re here and, presumably, why he’s mad at you.

Remember David, standing a little farther west of the rest of the squad’s position, behind cover. The only one in the blast radius of the grenade that fell. Remember the shout, remember him darting away. Good reflexes, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Maybe enough to save his life, but not enough. Squad darting for cover from the blast, except you, lunging for him.

Remember clapping your hands over his ears, (flimsy helmets, inadequate ear protection, cheap, inadequate head protection) pinning him underneath you, your body covering his, and then the blast—

Nod.

“I did.”

It hadn’t been a difficult calculation. All the enhancements they built into your armor and into your body when they cut you open and made you a Spartan.

You are built to take hits, but you can’t tell him that. Even if it weren’t classified, you can’t look at him with his hundreds of freckles and his scarred knuckles and his too-young face, and tell him that you were built to die. To fight, yes, to take hits, to get up and keep fighting, to not stop fighting until you died and not one second sooner.

Tap your head.

“My helmet,” you say. “It’s better than yours.”

 “What does that have to do with anything?”

“My helmet, my armor,” you say. “Knew the blast wouldn’t kill me.”

His jaw sets in an unhappy line, but it has the shape of understanding in it, of forgiveness.

“You still got fucked up.”

Shrug.

“I’ll be back in a week,” you guess. From the way he huffs, you’re probably not wrong. “It wouldn’t hurt me like it would hurt you.”

 He looks at you then. He looks a long time, and you can’t imagine what’s happening in that head of his, what he has to think about so long to understand.

“Yeah, well, be careful,” he grumbles, kicking back in his chair. “Remember, you’re Big Bird, not Superman.”

You don’t get that reference either. But you think you get the point. He pushes a hand through his hair, making it stick up in stupid directions.

“You thirsty or anything?” he asks, avoiding your eyes. “I can get you something, some ice chips or water or something.

Shake your head.

“Hungry, though,” you say. He goggles at you.

“You really shouldn’t be hungry,” he says. “Nurse said you wouldn’t be hungry— he said you might puke, but you wouldn’t be hungry.”

Shrug. “Hungry.”

He stares at you a moment longer, before shaking his head in disbelief.

“Okay,” he says, standing. “I’ll go see what I can find. What they’ll let me bring in here.”

Before he leaves he touches your shoulder briefly.

“Hey, seriously, though,” he says. “This is fucked up, but, thanks. But let’s not let it happen again? It’d really suck to head out there without my best friend at my back.”

Nod, and keep nodding as he leaves the room. It’s only as that his shadow falls out of site outside the doorway that his words full register in your soupy brain.

Best friend.

 

 

 

 

After that (or maybe even before, maybe you weren’t paying attention) you are treated as though you come as a set. David and Byrd. The Fan Man and Big B. Cockroach and the Muppet Man.

Tell him that makes him your sidekick. He retorts hotly that he’s 6’1, thanks, he’s no one’s sidekick. Call him short, just to listen to that pitch his voice hits when he’s outraged.

Next time the sergeant gathers you round for your next mission assignments, rest your elbow on his head while he wordlessly fumes.

 

 

 

 

He comes to know what you’re saying without you saying it. You don’t yet know how useful, how important that will be in the future, but for now words have always been hard on you, and talking with him (spoken and otherwise) is easy.

 

 

 

 

Your helmet is far more efficient at filtering out the stench of battle than theirs are, but you don’t need to take off your helmet to recognize the cocktail of burning rubber, heated metal and raw meat rising off the battlefield. The scent of dead Covenant adds a strange tang, like the acidic aftertaste of bile you can’t quite swallow past, and it is heavy in the air today. Ford is still vomiting behind an overturned warthog. Ford has a soft stomach.

David tilts his head at you, his smile that hides nothing on full display, a quirk of mischief hiding in the corners. You raise an eyebrow at him, and though he can’t see it, he seems to know, and answers.

“This victory was brought to you by the letter B.”

You don’t groan out loud. The rest of the squad is doing it for you.

 

 

 

 

Even when they reassign you to a different section of the front, you look for him on the battlefield. You listen for a voice calling for an overlarge yellow puppet from an outdated children’s show. Occasionally you do meet up with someone you fought with before, but it’s never David. It isn’t the same. The nickname doesn’t sound nearly as yellow-warm coming from someone else.

 

 

 

 

You are not a Spartan anymore, they told him. You are not a Specialist anymore. You are a Freelancer. You will respond to Agent Maine now. You nod. There isn’t anything else to do as they take your name again.

 

 

 

 

Life reminds you again that they can’t take everything from you.

Project Freelancer’s ranks fill quickly. You are only formally introduced to your Alpha Squad teammates, the rest you meet by chance, and piecemeal.

You recognize him by the way he moves, even before he speaks. Gray and yellow. Can’t cover the things about him you have memorized. Gray and yellow suit him.  He looks up from where he’s talking to Agent Connecticut, double takes at you across the Pelican Bay.

“Big B!” he crows, arms spread wide in welcome. As wide as the feeling of friendship in your chest, cracking open your ribs. Your strides and his eat up the ground between you until there’s none left.

Instead of the back-slapping hug of soldierly brotherhood he was expecting, wrap your arms tight around his middle and haul him into the air. Squeeze him too tight as he pats at your shoulders and laughs before dumping him on his feet again.

Drop your palm on the top of his helmet and rub it around, like you would if he were unarmored to mess up his hair. Noogie. He wobbles back and forth in your grip.

“Sto— fuck, B, stop!” but he’s laughing. “Stop it!”

Let him stumble out of your grip. You know he’s grinning up at you. Even with the lack of finger-sweep across his faceplate, even if his faceplate is now as opaque as yours, you know how his grin looks. He swats your shoulder and then doesn’t pull away.

“Is this where they shipped you off to?” he asks. “Fuck, B, I missed you!”

“You too,” you say. Small words for such a dense feeling. He squeezes your shoulder like he understands before pulling back. “You Alpha?”

 You look forward to working with him again. But he shakes his head.

“Nope, got assigned to Beta at the get go,” he says. “Already moving up in the rankings though, so watch your tailfeathers. I’m coming for you.”

“Better be.”

You mean that. But you shake off the disappointment; he is still here, after all. Most of the things (people) your orders take you away from don’t come back again. Reach for his shoulder, wanting to show, somehow, the affection you feel in a way that is tangible.

“Maine! Washington!”

You look up and straighten as you see Agent Carolina striding toward you, agent Florida on her heels. You like Agent Carolina, like her speed, her fierceness, the way during your first spar with her she ducked under your punch, mixed you up, and somehow ended up dropping you on your head (you still haven’t figured out how). From the tone of her voice she’s acting as ranking officer at the moment, even if her helmet is off and held tucked against her hip.

“You two know each other?” she asks.

You both nod.

“Served together,” you say. Carolina’s eyebrows lift in surprise. You are already becoming known for your way with words. Namely, how you rarely volunteer them when an alternative is presented.

“We were assigned to the same unit for a while, a year or two back,” David clarifies. Seventeen months, two weeks and five days ago. “Is that going to be a problem?”

You don’t have enough time to grow concerned before she’s shaking her head.

“No, there are a few who knew each other before joining the project,” she says. Her eyes meaningfully flicker to where the twins are arguing. “Just remember to stick to your new designations at all times. We don’t want previous identities and ranks to get in the way of what we’re trying to do here.”

“Not even old nicknames?” he asks, disappointment coloring his tone. She smiles at him, not unkindly.

“Not encouraged, no.”

“Guess we’ll never find out what ‘Big B’ means, then huh?” Florida pipes up from next to her. “I like a little mystery.”

Your grimace is hidden underneath your helmet. That isn’t exactly information you’d chose to share with Florida of all Freelancers, but he’ll know by the end of the day anyway. You see York talking to Niner over by her ship and suddenly think to be thankful D- Agent Washington chose to use the shortened form of his nickname for you.

“As long as it stays a mystery,” Carolina replies.

“Got it, Boss,” Wash agrees. Carolina’s eyebrows quirk again in surprise. You think she better get used to that. She’s clearly been around the longest of all of them, and it shows.

After she and Florida and move on, the two of you turn to each other, old names caught in your throats. The pace where they were held between the two of you is empty. He laughs, awkward. He is the same as always, and everything else has changed. Introductions, all over again.

“My roommate calls me ‘Wash’” he says, shrugging.

Smirk at him.

“Alpha gets our own rooms.”

“Shut up,” he shoves you. “Asshole. Just you wait, I’ll be up there with you before you know it.”

“Counting on it,” you reply, falling in step with him.

 

 

 

 

The Project is intense.

He stops calling you Big B. At least in public, where anyone else can hear him. At least out loud, but when he catches your eye as you stand together at the edge of the Pelican’s hatch, (prepare to engage in twenty, nineteen, eighteen—) he says it with the tilt of his helmet, and you know he is grinning in anticipation, drumming his scarred knuckles against his rifle.

“Ready, big guy?”

You nod. Together, you jump from the Pelican and into the fight.

 

 

 

 

A lot of things happen after that. A lot of things change. The man who was a Spartan, and then a Specialist, and then a Freelancer, and then wasn’t any of them at all at the end, he never hears Wash call him “Big Byrd” again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I think it’s going to be up to the three of you to save the day.”

“The three of us?”

“Yeah. You, Locus, and Big Byrd over there. What up, Big B?”

You wave back.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to akisawana for the beta!


End file.
